He’d been digging through the wreckage for a week. From it he produced his little figurines, each of them warped and blackened, many of them fused with other things, plastics melted together or even metals. He dragged them from the things that hadn’t burned: the brittled hulls of his kitchen appliances; the tiles and fixtures of his bathroom; the countless nails that once had held his walls together. It was August and the clothes that clung to him were black with soot and he tired easily in the heat. But he worked on, stopping only at noon when his neighbor brought him lunch, and again in the evening when he called him in for dinner.

He’d found one just now, the latest of his figurines. He crouched there among the wreckage turning it in his hand. Looking for color, for shape. For anything to recognize it by and so declare it hers. But he found neither color nor shape, he found nothing. And yet devotedly he rose and brought the little shapeless thing, the melted plastic nothing, to the flat of cardboard where he’d laid the others.

 

That night Charles lay beneath his tarp looking at his feet. The little shrine of figurines beside him. He wriggled the toes of one foot, then the other, making the little eyes that were his toenails blink in the darkness. Each of them a tropical blue, for his daughter had painted them the week before she’d died.

Already the blue polish was traveling upward, the unpainted crescent of newly-grown nail encroaching on it. The nails were past the length that he should have cut them, they were uncomfortable, and he told himself he would buy some nail clippers tomorrow. He’d told himself that the night before, and the night before that.

The girl had started painting them after her mother, Charles’s wife, had died. That was two years ago. Before then she had painted her mother’s nails. Charles liked the sensation of the little cap brush as it tickled against his toes. He could feel it even now, if he tried hard enough. He could see, even, the girl’s tongue pressed between her lips in concentration. When he saw that he wanted to look away. But there was nothing to look away from; she was a phantom, she existed only in his memories.

Sometimes, just as he would see the girl, he would see specks of color in the warped and twisted things laid on his cardboard. But these were phantoms too, they were not there, nor did those crude figures bear the shapes he sometimes attributed to them. They were all of them colorless, melted, and grotesque. Nothing in them that he could point to and say, Yes, this was hers, this thing I have torn from the wreckage of my house was my daughter’s _________. And he needed to be sure. He needed to know with absolute certainty that whatever it was he would keep as souvenir of his daughter’s life was hers. That she had made it, or at least had loved it and so made it hers.

As it was, his painted nails were the only color beneath the tarp, tropical even in the graying night, and they were all he had of her.

 

The next day, as Charles was digging, his neighbor came out waving his hands and practically running, stumbling across the lawn. “Charles!” he was saying. “Charles! Nancy’s found something!”

Charles straightened and rested his hands on his hips. He was tired, the morning already was very warm.

“Come out of there,” Ford said. “Nancy’s found something. Something of Claire’s.”

“What?” Charles said.

“A necklace. It has Claire’s name on it and everything. Nancy just called from the carwash. She found it under the seat while she was vacuuming. Oh, won’t you come the hell out of there?”

“A necklace,” Charles repeated. Yes; the girl had been making them out of beads. He looked down at the blackened wreckage he stood among and all of a sudden it felt foreign, offensive. He stepped out from it to where Ford stood in the lawn.

“She’ll bring it home when she’s done with her errands,” Ford said. “Why don’t you come on in and have lunch. We can have a drink to celebrate.”

“I’m not so sure,” Charles said.

“It has her name on it and everything,” Ford said. He seemed more excited than he, Charles, even was, and Charles felt moved by that but also a little troubled. He wanted to be excited, he wanted to be relieved, but he knew he couldn’t be until he saw the necklace for himself. “One drink won’t hurt you,” Ford said. “Have you had one at all since it happened?”

“No,” Charles said. “I haven’t been able to.”

“We might as well have lunch, at least,” Ford said. “Maybe you can quit a little early, just for the morning.”

Charles gave that some thought. “Okay,” he said. “I can do that I guess.”

 

But inside, as Ford made them their sandwiches, Charles found himself staring at the bottle of wine that stood sweating on the countertop. It was the same kind of bottle he’d watched Ford and his wife drink from each night at dinner. And he thought, looking from the bottle to the glass that Ford had poured for himself, that maybe his neighbor was right, that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have a drink.

“You know, I think I will have a little wine,” he said. “Would you mind?”

“Would I mind?” Ford said. “Would I mind?” And he hurried down a second glass and poured it and brought it to the table. He brought the sandwiches and raised his own glass. “I can’t tell you how happy I am for you,” he said. “For all of us. It’s been hard on us, watching you out there all day.”

“I know,” Charles said. He did not meet Ford’s glass with his own but he did drink. He set his glass down on the table and said, “When will she be home, do you think?”

“She’s just finishing some errands,” Ford said. “Then she’ll get Mary from camp and she’ll be home.”

Charles nodded. He started on his sandwich. He was feeling the wine already, it had been so long since his last drink, and it felt good. Even the sandwich tasted better than usual, though it was the same turkey sandwich Ford made him every day.

“Maybe now that you have the necklace you can stop,” Ford said. “Stop altogether I mean. Not just for the morning.”

“I don’t have it yet,” Charles said.

“You just as good as have it,” Ford said. “Her name and everything, right there, spelled out in beads. I can’t tell you how relieved I am about it.”

Charles thought about that. He said, “If it’s hers, I can probably stop. The things I’m finding, they’re nothing. They could be anything.”

“They’re ugly little things, aren’t they,” Ford said.

“Ugly, yes. Because they’ve got no color. If they had color, maybe they’d be beautiful.”

“Ugly, black little things,” Ford said. He chewed mindlessly at his sandwich. “Just burned up, twisted up junk.”

“Yes,” Charles said. “If only they had some color to them.”

“This necklace sure has some color,” Ford said. “All the colors in the world, it’s got.”

Charles put his sandwich down. “How do you know that?” he said.

“Oh. You know how these girls are. No sense for subtlety.”

“Have you seen it?” Charles said. “Have you seen the necklace?”

“How could I have seen it? I told you Nancy just found it.”

“I thought maybe you’d seen it.”

“I’m sure I’ve seen it before,” Ford said. “I’m sure I saw Claire wearing it.”

“Of course,” Charles said. “I know which one it is, I think.”

“With this, now, you can finally move on.”

“It’s possible,” Charles said. “I don’t know.”

“You can stop punishing yourself.”

“Oh.”

For a while neither man said anything. Then Ford said, “Don’t listen to me.”

“It’s alright.”

“What do I know?”

“It’s alright,” Charles said. “Maybe I can move on. Maybe you’re right. The necklace will help, I think.”

“I’m sure it will,” Ford said. “I just know it will.”

 

It was just afternoon when Nancy and Mary came home. The door opened and there they were. But they did not come immediately to the table, where Ford and Charles still sat, and so Ford called to them, “Well? What are you waiting for? Let’s see it.”

They stood there in the doorway. Nancy clutched her purse in both hands and Charles knew she had the necklace in there. But just as he knew that, he knew also that something was wrong. She did not come to the table. She just stood there with her daughter beside her. To Ford she said, “I wish you hadn’t said anything. I told you not to say anything.”

Ford turned to Charles. He’d been smiling obscenely but now the smile was melting from his face.

“I told you to wait until I showed Mary,” Nancy said. “Until we knew for sure.”

“What is it,” Charles said. “What’s happening?” Though he already knew.

Nancy came into the kitchen now. “Oh, Charles. I was wrong. It wasn’t hers at all.”

“I see,” Charles said. “But it had her name on it.”

“Yes. But it was Mary’s.”

Charles stared at Nancy, then at Mary, who had not moved from the doorway.

“We all have our ways of mourning,” Nancy said. “You see, Mary made it at camp. She’s taking a class in beads there. I’m so, so very sorry. I think it was her way of saying goodbye.”

The girl had begun to cry. “It’s alright,” Charles said. “Can I see it, anyway?”

Nancy produced the necklace from her purse. She laid it delicately in Charles’s opened palm. He looked at it, then put it on the table.

Ford said, reaching for the necklace, “Wait a minute. How do we know it wasn’t Claire’s? I’m sure I saw her wearing something just like it. Mary?”

But Mary shook her head.

“We’re so sorry,” Nancy said. “We know what it would have meant to you. It was just Mary’s way of mourning. We all have our ways. Though it must seem to you like a cruel kind of joke.”

“No,” Charles said. “I understand. It’s alright.” He rose from his chair.

Ford jumped up. “I still think this could be hers,” he said. He was turning the necklace roughly in his hands.

Charles went for the door. The girl moved aside for him, and then for the first time she spoke. “Would you like to keep it?” she said.

“Oh,” Charles said. “No, thank you. It’s yours.”

“Please. I’d like you to. I really would.”

Charles looked at her. He looked over at Ford, who was already walking toward him, thrusting the necklace out for him to take.

“Alright,” he said. “I guess I can do that.”

 

The days elapsed, the nights. All of them hot, all of them the same. His hands became thick with calluses from the roughness of his work, from palming up the framing nails which countless lay about the wreckage. The necklace lay with the other things on the piece of cardboard. A false label for his false shrine. He had tried wearing it but it was too false, it felt too wrong, and so he’d set it with his fused and blackened figurines where it made the only color among them. He added daily to his collection, crowding the cardboard with things that could not possibly have been his daughter’s, and yet which made the sum total of his daily efforts.

One afternoon as he was working, he felt something give way in his left shoe. He removed the shoe and the sock, both of them worn and blackened, to find that the nail of his big toe had broken. The exposed half-inch of it had shorn completely off leaving behind a shard, a potsherd of tropical blue that he had to fish out from his sock. He examined the sharp little thing. He pressed its pointed ends into the flesh of his thumb and forefinger. He tossed it away.

The pile of wreckage he’d picked through grew larger and larger, the unexamined waste flatter. The end of his labors confronted him. He slowed his pace, he got to sleeping during the day, though when asked about it by Ford or by Nancy he would just say that it was due to weariness, that he was tired. And how could they not believe him, who had for three weeks now moved piece by minute piece the ruins of his life, shifting them from one pile to another beneath the hateful August sun.

The August sun, and then the September. Because one morning Mary was standing at the end of her driveway wearing her bookbag, and the road itself was busy again with cars. She waved to Charles, already awake and working languidly at his task. He waved back. She stood there another few minutes looking out at the road, and then she came over to him. She said, “You didn’t like my necklace.”

“Oh. No. It wasn’t that.”

“It’s okay. Tell me the truth. You didn’t like it.”

“Only because it wasn’t hers. It’s a fine necklace.”

“She lost hers. That’s why I made it. It wasn’t really what Mom said about mourning. I don’t really know what mourning is.”

“Oh,” Charles said. “Yes. I remember now.” Or at least, he couldn’t remember having seen his daughter in the necklace for some time.

“She was upset about losing it, so I made her a replacement.”

“That was very nice of you,” Charles said.

The girl looked over at his tarp, his meaningless possibilities among which the necklace lay. “But I couldn’t give it to her,” she said.

“I know,” Charles said. “I’m so sorry.”

She was still looking at the tarp. “What will you do with them?” she asked. “With all the things you found.”

“I don’t know. Probably just throw them away.”

“You can throw the necklace away too.”

“I could give it back to you, if you like.”

Mary shook her head. “I should go back to my driveway.”

“The bus will stop here if it sees you.”

“It’s alright. I should go back.”

But the girl didn’t go. She just stood there. Charles looked at her small body before him and said, his voice strained and foreign, “I’m so sorry Mary. I shouldn’t have left her alone. She wasn’t old enough. You aren’t old enough. You aren’t old enough for any of this.”

The girl said nothing. Finally she walked back to her driveway. The bus came loudly around the corner and stopped and Charles looked over at all the young faces pressed against the glass, staring. He knew what they were staring at. Mary got on the bus and the bus drove on and when it was gone he sat down and wept.

 

And then, one day, he was done. It was another school day, the bus had come for Mary, but he could not have told you the day of the week. The concrete slab his house had been built upon lay naked among the grass, which already had begun to grow back, and he stood there on its level surface staring at the mound of picked-through rubble. It looked too small to have been his house and so too did the slab he stood upon, it seemed impossibly small for how large his life had once felt.

Ford, when he came out with Charles’s sandwich, said, “Now I guess you’ll let them clear it away.”

“Yes,” Charles said, though he didn’t know who they were. He had not yet thought about that.

Ford had come with not only the sandwich but a wooden box, too, and he said, “Here. Why don’t you use this instead of that piece of cardboard.”

Charles took the box from him. It was a wine box and it had the name of the winery burned into it.

“It will be good when they clear it all away,” Ford said. “Good for you. Good for Mary.”

“Yes,” Charles said. “I’m sorry you’ve had to look at that for so long. I’m sorry Mary had to.”

“Oh, no,” Ford said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It’s alright,” Charles said.

“I don’t want you to think I meant it like that.”

Charles closed his eyes. He could feel the smooth wood of the box on his fingers, the depressions that made the winery’s name.

“We sure hope you build another house,” Ford said.

“We’d hate for you to move.”

Charles gripped the box. He wanted to drop it and he had to grip it tightly so he didn’t. But he wanted to, and not just drop it but smash it, smash it to splinters at the feet of this other man. Who still had everything, who had even just the right-sized box to give him, which box itself Charles had watched Ford take bottle and bottle from nightly, to enjoy with his family around him.

“Of course, we’d understand if you did,” Ford said. “If it was too much for you. If you felt you had to move, to let yourself–to recover.”

Charles opened his eyes. “I don’t want to recover,” he said. “Don’t you see? I don’t want to.”

Ford just looked at him.

“Thank you for the box. Now please.”

Ford kept looking at him. Finally he turned and walked away, leaving Charles alone on his small and naked slab.

 

He swept everything from the cardboard into the box and dropped it, box and necklace and figurines alike, onto the pile to be taken away. That night he lay under a blanket Nancy had given him, for the nights had grown cool. He could feel his jagged toenails catching on the blanket’s fabric; three more had shorn off, he could not say when, and he’d never bothered to trim them. He lifted up the blanket and peered down at his feet. At those crescented unpainted portions encroaching, encroaching. Even the painted portions now were worn and scratched. But not faded, at least; where the polish still clung it was as bright as he remembered it being when his daughter had applied it. The big toe on his right foot was the best of what remained but this too would have its polish worn away, scratched away, before it broke off like the others. And as he thought about that he told himself, or anyone who would listen, God maybe, that he was done trying to reverse time now. That he would stop trying to reverse time if only he could just freeze it, stop its ceaseless encroachment and obliteration.

 

They came to remove the wreckage. It was a salvage crew that Ford had found and if they seemed uncertain about the pile that met them, why not a single piece of it was on the slab itself but to the side, neatly combed through and replaced there, they gave no sign of it. They asked no questions, removing it all by hand and by shovel into a single solitary dumpster. Charles sat there watching them, his feet bare because his shoes by now had given out entirely.

When they’d finished and nothing but the slab remained, and his tarp, and his car which he had not once driven since coming here to find his house, impossibly, burned to the ground, he rose abruptly and walked over to the crew foreman to ask him something.

“Boltcutters?” the man said. “No. You’d think so, wouldn’t you. But no.“

“Oh,” Charles said. “Anything like that?”

“What’s like boltcutters?”

“I don’t know,” Charles said. “A hacksaw, maybe.”

The man shook his head. “What is it you’re trying to do?”

“I just need to cut something, that’s all.”

The man shrugged. “You could try one of the shovels. Put whatever it is on the ground and just chop at it. But they’re only transfer shovels. You saw them.”

Charles looked over now to the truck the men had come in. The shovels hung vertically on the slatted wooden wall of the truck’s bed and they were the big, broad, scooping kind.

“No,” Charles said. “Thank you, though.”

“Hardware store ought to have what you need,” the man said.

“Yes,” Charles said. “That’s where I’ll go.”

 

Though he hadn’t driven the car since the fire, he had been in it once, and that to look through it for anything his daughter might have left. But, unforgivably, because what had taken him away that night was a date with a woman he’d recently met, his first date since his wife had died, he’d taken all of the girl’s things from the car and put them in the house. And this, he knew, was why he was being punished: he had tried to move on.

He parked and went into the store. It was a small store, family-owned, and some of the people who worked there knew him. He expected them all to hush when he came in, he braced himself for it, but they went on talking, just as they’d been before the little bell above the door announced his presence. They didn’t even comment on his bare feet. He went to the aisle where the tools were and found the boltcutters. There was just the one pair and he took it from its pegs and opened its arms as wide as they would go, watching the complex mechanics that powered the tiny jaws. That enabled them to cut through steel and, he couldn’t see why not, even bone.

He paid and left the store. He brought the boltcutters to his car and laid them on the passenger seat beside him. He sat there staring at them. He looked down at the big toe of his right foot, the expanse of blue polish. Then, in a sudden jerking motion, he picked the boltcutters up and opened them and set their jaws down on either side of the toe. He paused. He could feel the cold metal resting on his skin. He took the boltcutters away. He didn’t think he could do it. But he knew that he must, because he had nothing else. He took them up again and with his arms opened wide to spread wide the arms of the boltcutters put them back around his toe. He started to squeeze the arms closed. He felt the cold metal pinching now, pressing urgently on the flesh of his toe. Do it, he told himself. You must do it. He closed his eyes. And then, in one enormous, tiny motion, he squeezed the arms of the boltcutters together.

He heard a crunch, and felt a searing pain, and when he opened his eyes he saw his blood spurting out, spraying all over the footpedals of the car.

He did not yet lose consciousness. He leaned over to pick up his severed toe, but he could not find it. His blood was spurting out everywhere. It dripped from the pedals like rain after a storm. He slid his hand desperately along the floormat. And then, at last, his fingers found something beneath his seat, and closed around it. It felt knobby and slick with blood, and strangely thin, almost stringy. He dragged the thing out from under the seat and held it up to better see it.

And what he held was not his severed toe at all. There, depending from his hand, slick from her own father’s blood, was the necklace his daughter had lost, her name spelled out in beads.